The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

  Squanto had been kidnapped by English sailors fifteen years before and taken to London, where he was trained to be a guide and interpreter and learned English. He managed to escape on a returning boat. By chance, or through God’s providence, the Pilgrims had hit America next to the tribal home of the Native American who was certainly the only fluent native-English speaker for hundreds of miles around and arguably the most fluent English speaker on the entire continent: and he had been delivered into their hands, or they into his.

  Bill Bryson, author of books on the English language, Made in America and Mother Tongue, is in no doubt about the key importance of Squanto:

  The Pilgrim Fathers were extremely fortunate to find a person who was both sympathetic and could communicate with them in an efficient manner. You couldn’t have had a more helpless group of people to start a new society. They brought all the wrong stuff, they didn’t really bring people who were expert in agriculture or fishing. They were coming with a lot of faith and not a great deal of preparation. They were nearly wiped out with the hardship of it. With Squanto they just squeaked through. He taught them not only which things would grow but also how to fertilise corn seed by adding little pieces of fish — the fish would rot and actually fertilise the seed — and he taught them how to eat all kinds of things from the sea.

  Squanto engineered the survival of the Pilgrim Fathers and it was because of his help that an English-speaking society eventually prevailed there. Their own language had saved them. Now they not only survived, they multiplied. By 1640, another two hundred ships had brought fifteen thousand more settlers to New England. Twenty-five thousand inhabitants had spread out into settlements around the area. They found new plants, new animals, new geographical features, and they needed new words to describe them. Some came from local languages, others from new combinations of English words or from familiar names applied to unfamiliar animals and birds.

  New words for geographical features which defied close comparison with the English landscape known to the early settlers, who came largely from the flatlands, include “foothill,” “notch,” “gap,” “bluff,” “divide,” “watershed,” “clearing” and “underbrush.” Native words for natural things included “moose,” “raccoon,” “skunk,” “opossum” and “terrapin”; for native foods “hominy” and “squash” for the variety of pumpkin grown there. “Squaw” came in, as did “wigwam,” “totem,” “papoose,” “moccasin” and “tomahawk.” William Penn remarked on the beauty of the native language. He wrote: “I know not a Language spoken in Europe that hath words of more sweetness and greatness, in Accent and Emphasis, than theirs.” And many place names came from Native American words, as do numerous rivers, including the Susquehanna, the Potomac and the Miramichi.

  The language of the Native Americans is on the map and in the conversation, but given their overwhelming numbers, given the beauty of the language as described by William Penn and the Native Americans’ ownership of the land, it is more surprising that their words are not there in great numbers. English and those who spoke and wrote it stuck to their own wherever possible.

  So they would coin new English words for natural things as often as they could, as with “mud hen,” “rattlesnake,” “garter snake,” “bull-frog,” “potato-bug,” “ground-hog” and “reedbird.” They preferred their own words even when describing Native American life, as with “war-path,” “pale-face,” “medicine man,” “peace-pipe,” “big chief ” and “warpaint.” English seemed more comfortable with its own.

  It could be argued that what is really remarkable is not that Indian words came into the English vocabulary — what could be more natural or necessary? — but that so few of them were admitted. Norse had made serious attacks on English grammar in the ninth and tenth centuries and made such a deep thrust into English that in the north three centuries after the Pilgrim Fathers went to America, the effect of their accent and vocabulary was still recognisable. Latin had never let its spring be blocked, coming in through the Church at the time of Bede, via French, via Italian, and again through the exuberance of the Renaissance scholars; Latin brought thousands of words. And the inundation of French has been repeated often enough. But in America, faced with hundreds of languages, English took on words only in handfuls. In the writings of the Founding Fathers there are fewer than a dozen borrowed Indian words.

  Perhaps they were so word crammed, so smitten by the word spell of the Bible and whatever phrases of Shakespeare and his contemporaries had by then entered common currency, that they felt no need for more. The bounty of the Bible and the Renaissance would take time to digest. Or perhaps Squanto spoiled them. He did their dealings with the natives for them, he was a willing interpreter, a blessed short cut. And the Native Americans, it seemed, enjoyed picking up English, partly to baffle less cosmopolitan tribes, partly for the fun of it. Another reason not to try so hard. Moreover, the English found the native languages very difficult. The word “skunk,” for instance, began as the uneasy “segankw”; “squash,” much more alarmingly, was “asquutasquash”; “raccoon” was one of many which originally had several native names: “rahaugcum,” “raugroughcum,” “arocoune,” “arathkone,” “aroughcum” and “rarowcun.” Perhaps the struggle to reproduce the native pronunciation was just too much and they settled for raccoon.

  Again and again, the colonists seem to have refused to grapple with local words and preferred their own. The text of Wood’s New England’s Prospect reads in part:

  Of the birds and fowls both of land and water . . .

  The eagles of the country be of two sorts, one like the eagles that be in England, the other is something bigger with a great white head and white tail . . .

  The hum-bird is one of the wonders of the country being no bigger than a hornet.

  The old-wives be a fowl that never leave talking day or night, something bigger than a duck. The loon is an ill shaped thing like a cormorant, but that he can neither go nor fly.

  The turkey is a very large bird, for he may be in weight fifty pound. He hath the use of his long legs so ready that he can run as fast as a dog and fly as well as a goose.

  That was largely how English named what it saw in the New World. “Hum-bird,” “old-wife” and “loon” make their first appearance in print here: turkeys and eagles are unfamiliar birds called by familiar names. America is full of examples of such anglicised birds, beasts, trees and flowers. “Robin” has a red breast but it is a type of thrush; American “rabbits” are English “hares.”

  Perhaps it was fear of the unknown which made them reach for the comfort of old familiar names. They certainly did this with place names. Ipswich, Norwich, Boston, Hull, several Londons, Cambridge, Bedford, Falmouth, Plymouth, Dartmouth — there are hundreds in New England. New England, those two simple words, say a very great deal. Insofar as they could, these stern fathers wanted to recreate the place they had left behind, knowing full well it was new but wanting for many reasons to hold on to the old.

  Scott Attwood at the Plimouth Plantation had this to say:

  I think their instinct was that the English language would take over. They were very proud of being Englishmen. They had their differences with the Reforms in the church and other matters under the rule of King James I, but they were still very proud to be Englishmen and considered it just the natural way that people should speak. There were much greater attempts to make the natives learn English than there were for anyone to learn native tongues. In the second generation after the Pilgrims, Christian schools were set up for the natives to teach them English, with the single perception that this was a better way to speak.

  They were of course men and women with a mission. Those who see the skull beneath the flesh will conclude that to ignore or virtually to ignore the language of so many peoples, with whom you would eventually fight, over whom you will finally rule, is the first step in plotting their subjugation. Others would say that the zeal of the Christian was such that the word of God and the spreading
of the word of God so that souls could be saved and salvation brought to those hitherto outside the Christian fold was a paramount imperative. The Native Americans had to learn English to understand about God and be saved.

  Those and other factors feed into the mix of reasons which became the set truth, that English prevailed as often as possible; that English looked at this enormous continent on which it had the merest toehold and claimed it as “my America.”

  It seems that from quite early on there was an erosion of original regional accents. Being crammed into a single boat and forced into cramped intimacy might have speeded this up. The central and essential features of life were reading aloud from the Bible and listening to very long sermons. Rhetoric, the delight of Elizabeth I, was not encouraged. As the preface to the Bay Psalm Book, the first book published in English in America in 1640, said, “God’s altar needs not our polishings.” A standard accent began to appear reasonably quickly.

  These people were obsessively aware of the power of words. Improper speech was a crime. Blasphemy, slander, cursing, lying, railing, reviling, scolding, swearing and threatening were all offences. Curse God and you were in the stocks for three hours. Deny the scriptures and you would be whipped or you could be hanged. Language was what they lived by: language was what they lived for, provided it was the right language.

  They set out to control it, and control began in the schoolroom.

  The New England Primer sold over three million copies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including copies to schools, which means that every English-speaking family in America must have worked their way through this clear, well-constructed teaching aid. It was totally grounded in the positive view of the religious life, its duties, its goals, its commandments. This was a society with a very high regard for literacy. Every settlement of fifty people had to provide a teacher to ensure that children could read and write.

  The Primer — for reading and spelling — was simple and to the point. Every child was to get it by heart.

  A: In Adam’s Fall, we sinned all.

  B: Heaven to find, the Bible mind.

  C: Christ crucify’d, for sinners dy’d.

  D: The Deluge drown’d the earth around.

  E: Elijah hid by ravens fed.

  F: The judgement made Felix afraid.

  G: As runs the Glass, our life doth pass.

  H: My book and Heart must never part.

  J: Job feels the rod, yet blesses God.

  There will be commentators who might call this religious propaganda, but context is vital. It was the strength of their religious convictions which had led the Pilgrims to take terrible risks in their own country. They valued greatly what they had bought so dearly and it was a prize they were committed, divinely commanded, to pass on.

  K: Proud Korah’s troop was swallowed up.

  L: Lot fled to Zoar, saw fiery Shower on Sodom pour.

  M: Moses was he who Israel’s host led thro’ the Sea.

  By the end of the seventeenth century, English was being heard and taught along more than a thousand miles of the eastern coast, and the first colonies in Massachusetts and Virginia had been joined by Maryland (1633), Rhode Island (1636), Connecticut (1636), New Hampshire (1638), North and South Carolina (1663), New Jersey (1664) and Pennsylvania (1682). Georgia came on board in 1732 and all but two of these — Massachusetts and Connecticut — take their names from people and places in England and not from Native American terms.

  War brought other colonies under British rule. New Amsterdam was taken and became New York in 1664. New Sweden became New Delaware. Dutch terms remain in Breukelen (Brooklyn) and Haarlem, and in “waffle,” “coleslaw,” “landscape” (as it had done back in England), “caboose,” “sleigh,” “boss” (to become very important as a way in which slaves and servants could address their employers or owners without calling them “master”), “snoop” and “spook.”

  There was rivalry with the French of course. Why should that incessant enmity be given up just because they had moved thousands of miles west and to a continent which had room enough for France and England tens of times over? When the New World old-style war ended in 1763, England was given the rights to all the territory between the coast and the Mississippi and took a hold to the north in Canada. Meanwhile, the word-flow from French continued. “Toboggan” and “caribou” came from native to French to English, as did “bayou,” “butte” and “crevasse,” describing landscape features. There was the “depot,” and “cents” and “dimes” were kept in a “cache.” There would be words from French New Orleans — “praline” and “gopher.” “Chowder” from the Breton, and “picayune,” a small coin, came to mean anything small. Borrowings from the Spanish were on a very big scale — Spanish is still the biggest feeder into American English: “barbecue,” “chocolate,” “stampede,” “tornado” and “plaza.”

  American English was gathering its own forces although there are those who argue that its vocabulary does not become distinctively American until some decades after the Declaration of Independence. Before this, however, words appeared which are new to the English language and are found during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They derive their popularity from the development of the American political system: “congressional,” “presidential,” “gubernatorial,” “congressman,” “caucus,” “mass meeting,” “state-house,” “land office.” (Again, the English habit of looking to Latin to validate the new.) And steadily, remorselessly, the new way of life was finding its own English: “back country,” “backwoodsman,” “log cabin,” “clapboard,” “cold snap,” “snow-plough,” “bob-sled.”

  A more extended mix of accents was now arriving from the old country. William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681, Philadelphia in 1682. It was then a mixed population of English Quakers, Welsh, Scots, Irish and Germans. After 1720 many Ulstermen (about fifty thousand) arrive on the east coast, find the land occupied and go west and south and by 1750 Pennsylvania is one-third English, one-third Scots and one-third German. The Germans too were escaping religious persecution and their hybrid language, Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch), still survives through association with the Amish and the Mennonites. A generation after Culloden (1746), as a result of Scottish landowners evicting their tenants, thousands of Scots go west. The population is coming from different areas of Britain, but the advance of English is uninterrupted.

  What gave English primacy over the other languages of Britain besides that sense of mission was the force of numbers and the sense of occupation. What gave it a stronger presence than the other European languages, French and Spanish in particular, came through the ploughshare. On the whole the Spanish had sent armies and priests and taken gold. The French sent fur trappers and looked for trade. The English came to settle and that finally ensured that it was the language of Tyndale and Shakespeare which would be heard in the mid eighteenth century from the Atlantic coast to the Appalachian Mountains.

  As English spread, it began to chafe at the bonds and then to cut loose from the language spoken in England. In some cases meaning had shifted. The English “shop” became the American “store.” “Lumber” was rubbish in London; on the east coast it was and is “cut timber.” An English “biscuit” was an American “cracker.” An American “pond” could be as big as an English “lake”; an American “rock” could be as small as an English “pebble.” In America a piece of land became a “lot,” named after the method of drawing lots to determine which new owner received which new territory.

  It was also developing a sound of its own. The blend of dialects started on the ships quickly came to mean that no single accent dominated. The accent today around the north-eastern corner of America is largely uniform and beguiling in its crisp distillation of dialects. And across America, to this day, there is a comparatively small variation of accents compared to the deep differences still rooted in Britain. English upper-class visitors to America noted the absence of regional pronunciation with approval. In 1764 L
ord Gordon wrote: “The propriety of language here surprised me much, the English tongue being spoken by all ranks, in a degree of purity and perfection, surpassing any but the polite part of London.” Another visitor observed: “We hear nothing so bad in America as the Suffolk whine, the Yorkshire clipping or the Newcastle guttural. We never hear the letter ‘h’ aspirated improperly, nor omitted to be aspirated where propriety requires it. The common pronunciation approximates to that of the well-educated class in London and its vicinity.”

  In 1781, John Witherspoon, a Scotsman who was President of Princeton, wrote, convincingly:

  The vulgar Americans speak much better than the vulgar in Great Britain for a very obvious reason viz. that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology. There is a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain than there is between one state and another in America.

  Even The Last of the Mohicans author, James Fenimore Cooper, joined in: “The people of the United States speak . . . incomparably better English than the people of the mother country.” This opinion was repeated over and again. The Americans did not just speak good English, they spoke it better than the English back in England. They were delighted, even hubristic, about this: they stood apart and had no need of English tuition on anything.

  In 1775, on the bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, a gun was fired. It was, Emerson said, a “shot heard around the world” and the American Revolution began. A year later, thirteen colonies declared their independence. The language for the great moment was at hand. It was perfect classical English, a masterpiece of English prose.